The powerful individualist and subjectivist turn in anthropology - a turn that cannot be easily separated from larger political processes of neo-liberalism and neo-conservatism - is one factor resulting in notions of the social and of society as becoming little else than empty shells of small or no analytical value. Abstractions such as capitalism, consumerism, and the market are thrown around with abandon and often given an unexamined descriptive and explanatory potency. The essays presented here (all by leading anthropologists) take a variety of positions on the matter of the retreat of the social. All demonstrate that if anthropology and other social sciences are to fulfill the task of a critical understanding of the diverse realities in which we all must live, it will find it impossible to do without a strong concept of the social.
